XINU OS – Xinu Is Not Unix | Hacker News Reader

XINU OS – Xinu Is Not Unix

xinu.cs.purdue.edu

109 pointstmlee36 comments

More important than the acronym is the effort itself. XINU is a really interesting project and probably the second OS I was introduced to outside of the POSIXy neighbourhood. It differs from a lot of other projects in that its goals (to my understanding) were very different to the usual approach toward providing POSIX compliance or a platform intended to support layering POSIX on top of a base architecture.

I picked up an old copy of the textbook and never read it. Maybe this is the kick I needed to pick up the newer edition and actually check it out in earnest!

When I first learned C I also read Lions' Notes on v6 Unix, and kind of saw what was going on, but the XINU book really drove home how kernels worked. The XINU book on internetworking was similarly great.

Is there a document or video that gives an overview of the XINU architecture?

Seriously, as neither the website nor the Wikipedia article tell me crap about that. Guess we're expected to buy a book... (sighs)

If you happen to read this, the courses at Purdue which are based around XINU seem to be CS354 and CS503. Some google-fu turns up lecture notes but I'll avoid linking them due to the fact that they don't seem to be openly distributed.

That may or may not be what you were after since the book is probably more detailed at to the point than the course notes would be.

Not to forget a Berkeley company from long ago called Mt Xinu. (Unix TM backwards).

They made one of the funniest *nix related calendars ever among other good things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu

I still have a Mt. Xinu poster they put out in the mid 80s with a BSD X-Wing fighter attacking the AT&T System V Death Star.

A more elegant poster, from a more civilized time.

The license is here: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/xlicense.html (I had to google for it)

I took the CS OS grad. course at Purdue last semester that taught OS principles using XINU. Overall, I think the OS is great. Used primarily for embedded systems (routers were the common example) it was simple, quite extensible and fun to learn.

There is a FreeBSD-derived OS called Xinuos that is different than this and caused me much confusion ...

http://www.xinuos.com

Not to be confused with... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

Does anyone know if XINU is used in Purdue's undergrad OS classes these days? I went there and it was not mentioned even once (took OS around '04). Most of what we did was in Nachos[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Another_Completely_Heurist...

CS354 (OS) at Purdue used XINU for the majority of the semester I took it in 2013

Xinu is used for code in Douglas Comer's book on TCP/IP, early editions.

XINU is used for CS354, the undergrad CS OS course (and has been for at least the last 2 years). A different OS is used for the undergrad ECE OS course; I think it may be Nachos, but I'm not sure.

Currently procrastinating on a project using Xinu at Purdue. Some of the systems are dead basic, which makes it really great as a teaching tool.

"network communication, local and remote file systems"

Network communication sans TCP it appears.

See now this is my kind of acronym. Things like "gnu's not unix" are too arbitrary; you can replace the 'g' with anything and still get an acronym that works. XINU is nice, elegant, and unambiguous.

Same with WINE - Wine Is Not an Emulator

How about: WINE - Wine is no emulator?

I don't see the difference..?

He is pointing out that leaving out "is" in "GNU is not Unix" is pretty lousy way to make an acronym (if that could be called acronym at all), as "is" is as much word as "not" or "Unix" are and omitting it is arbitrary. It isn't a preposition or something.

Removing one and two letter words from acronyms is commonplace.

Yeah, you mean prepositions, which "is" isn't. I don't really care, btw, just clarifying what parent (probably) tried to say.

> Yeah, you mean prepositions

No I don't. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Numerals_and_constitue... and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette

Maybe he means that Xinu is Unix backwards.

It's a recursive acronym that is also UNIX backwards:

XINU

Not

Unix

It's also UNIX written in reverse.

I completely missed that. Now my OCD's thirst has been slaked. Thanks.

GINX is not UNIX?

Genuino is not UNIX

Hmm, they look like identical forms of wordplay, with GNU having the added advantage of being an actual word.

XINUL anyone?

Xinul Is Not (your) Uncle's Linux

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